1987: The Great Renaming – Page 1

Background

As of 1987, there existed three international newsgroup hierarchies:
net.*, mod.*, and fa.*, in which
newsgroups were sorted. Net.* was the hierarchy in which
unmoderated groups were placed, mod.* for moderated groups,
and fa.* for groups originating from ARPANET. The Usenet
newsgroup naming process during this era was fairly random and
difficult to navigate, and because of the rapid growth of Usenet,
the administration of all of these loosely organized newsgroups with
their three hierarchies because a huge burden. Also, at this time,
European members of the Usenet community were encountering problems
because many European networks refused to carry newsgroups which dealt
with religion or racism. These factors all combined to inspire The
Great Renaming.

The Backbone Cabal, a primary
influence in matters concerning Usenet, proposed a reorganization of
the Usenet hierarchy and newsgroup naming structures. This push was
not the first time that reorganization of Usenet had been discussed,
but earlier attempts were thwarted by software limitations, which were
resolved with improvements wrought by Rick
Adams'B News
version 2.11. B News 2.11 was re-crafted to accommodate the use
of newsreaders for posting to moderated groups and removed the
requirement for moderated newsgroups to use 'mod' as a prefix. The
new B News version also stopped using the flat storage method,
thus allowing for newsgroups to be named without requiring the first
14 characters of the group to be unique. With those software issues
resolved, 1987 was an apt time to make much needed changes to Usenet's
structure.

The Big Seven

The key players of The Great Renaming devised a hierarchical system
which organized newsgroups into seven different hierarchies based
on their topic of discussion. Acknowledging the problems that the
European networks were encountering, the talk.* hierarchy
was proposed. The talk.* hierarchy would incorporate those
newsgroups which the European networks found objectionable and would
funnel other discussion newsgroups which dealt with controversial
topics, thus allowing the objecting networks to merely omit this
hierarchy from their servers.

The other members of the Big Seven family included: misc.*,
comp.*, sci.*, soc.*, rec.*,
and news.*. Misc.* would be home to newsgroups
with miscellaneous topics that did not fit into another hierarchy,
comp.* was for computer related newsgroups, sci.*
for scientific discussions, soc.* contained social and
societal discussions, rec.* covered all things recreational
and entertainment, and news.* was Usenet's own hierarchy,
created to discuss newsgroup related topics. The 8th "Big" hierarchy,
humanities.* did not come into existence until after the
initial Great Renaming.